The Research Focus Symbiosis of the Faculty of Life Sciences will be holding the next "Let's talk about symbiosis"- workshop on Friday the 17th of April. To register, please send an e-mail to Andrea Nussbaumer (
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) and let her know if you want to give a presentation or just to participate. The deadline for the registration is March 27th. For the presentation, you only need to submit a title. Non-presenting participants are also required to register, so we can organize accordingly.

Julia and Monika attended the Symbiomics Conference and 4th Annual Meeting in Palma de Mallorca, 12th to 14th November 2014. Several invited scientific leaders in symbiosis presented their work and provided valuable comments and suggestions for the PhD students of this program. All students presented their work and Julia gave a talk on her PhD thesis project: “Ecological and evolutionary role of horizontal transmission in the model system Riftia pachyptila” Little time was left in this excellent meeting for discovering Palma de Mallorca. Nevertheless, we managed to get our feet wet when taking a selfie at the beach.

Science retreat

Our yearly science retreat was in Puhrbach - Burgenland Oct 17-19, 2014. Inspired by the spacy decoration in our seminar room we discussed the past and brainstormed about the future.

new paper in Frontiers in Microbiology

There is a new review on the giant ciliate mutualism from chemosynthesis-based marine shallow waters

Symbioses between chemoautotrophic sulfur-oxidizing (thiotrophic) bacteria and protists or animals are among the most diverse and prevalent in the ocean. They are extremely difficult to maintain in aquaria and no thiotrophic symbiosis involving an animal host has ever been successfully cultivated. In contrast, we have cultivated the giant ciliate Zoothamnium niveum and its obligate ectosymbiont Cand. Thiobios zoothamnicoli in small flow-through aquaria. This review provides an overview of the host and the symbiont and their phylogenetic relationships. We summarize our knowledge on the ecology, geographic distribution and life cycle of the host, on the vertical transmission of the symbiont, and on the cultivation of this symbiosis. We then discuss the benefits and costs involved in this cooperation compared with other thiotrophic symbioses and outline our view on the evolution and persistence of this byproduct mutualism.
journal article and download article as pdf file (open access)

Conferences summer 2013

Monika was at the Marine Molecular Ecology Gordon Conference in Hong Kong between August 11 – 16, 2013 and gave an invited lecture on the Riftia and Zoothamnium symbioses.

Salva, Monika, Jean Marie, Florian and Julia attended the 5th International Symposium on Chemosynthesis-Based Ecosystems in Victoria, Canada between August 18 – 23, 2013. Florian presented a poster, Julia gave a talk on some of her thesis results on the Riftia symbiosis, while Jean Marie presented the results of the whole TioCiM group on the Zoothamnium symbiosis